Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Investor's Business Daily: Dems climate talkathon "was just an attempt to draw attention to a pseudo problem"

Hysterics: Democrats from the secretary of state to Senate lawmakers can't let go of their climate change obsession. Meanwhile, a group of NASA scientists and engineers says there's no danger. To whom do we listen?

We'd say the folks at NASA. It's unlikely the media will see it that way, though. They have too much invested in that other scientific "consensus" that says man is heating the planet to listen to officials at NASA who disagree with the press-feted, fanatically political James Hansen.

What do get wide coverage, though, are the rants of Secretary of State John Kerry, who has been screeching about climate change for some time now. Not so long ago, he called it "the greatest challenge of our generation."

In addition to that madness, Kerry is asking the U.S. ambassadors who work under him to make climate change their diplomatic priority.

Not terrorism. Not Russia. Not America's damaged reputation around the world. Not weapons of mass destruction in the hands of belligerents. Climate change.

"The environment has been one of the central causes of my life," he told his envoys in what is reported to be his first department-wide policy guidance statement since becoming secretary a year ago.

Rather arrogant, we'd say, for the man to enlist an entire federal department, indeed, an entire nation, to fixate on one of the most important causes in his life.

While Kerry continues to bully his staff and distort foreign policy for a personal interest, Senate Democrats, 28 of them and two independents, held a global warming talkathon Monday night through Tuesday morning. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, who is a co-founder of the Senate Climate Action Task Force, says Democrats wanted to use the all-nighter to "wake up Congress."

The gabfest wasn't a filibuster. It was just an attempt to draw attention to a pseudo problem — and away from the Democrats' many real problems: the disaster of ObamaCare, the historically weak economy, unacceptably high unemployment and feckless foreign policy.

It was also a disturbing exhibition of silliness. The event was a sophomoric stunt and a profile in hypocrisy. As Anthony Watts wrote in his blog Wattsupwiththat, the senators had "a 'denier bashing fest' while" basking "in the warmth provided by steam from the coal-fired Capitol power plant."

Rather than bash deniers, or fence them into some lepers ghetto as Apple CEO Tim Cook and Virgin CEO Richard Branson seem to want, the senators should have invited the Right Climate Stuff Research Team to their festival. This group of more than 20 retired NASA Apollo scientists and engineers — James Delingpole at Breitbart.com calls them "the men who put Neil Armstrong on the moon" — would have put their worries at ease.

"There is no convincing physical evidence of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming," the group says in a summary of its preliminary report.

The team also says that anthropogenic global warming is not settled science, doesn't believe it to be an immediate threat, and insists that the computer models that the alarmists have so much faith in "need to be validated before being used in critical decision-making."

What's really going to keep the group out of the mainstream news coverage, though, is its finding that even if we burned all of Earth's "remaining economically recoverable fossil fuel reserves," we could not "raise global average surface temperatures more than 1.2 degrees Celsius above current levels."

This is good news for Branson, whose airlines have spit out tens of millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide through the years.